Welcome to another week of travel. This week, we’re currently in Los Angeles, enjoying lots of yummy food, walking up steep hills (so many!), and slowly navigating the highway system.
When we tell people about our current lifestyle, we get asked one question right away. “Are you doing this in a van?” We keep meaning to start a tally of how many times we get asked this, but we’ve already lost count.
We tell them no, we’re staying in Airbnbs, and I can see the gears start turning about how expensive that must be. But when we tell them we sold our home in Seattle, I see it click for them. Ooooh, they made real estate money, that’s how they’re doing it.
But the truth is, not really. Of course, we have the huge privilege of having owned a home and sold it for a profit. We sold in August 2022; after a couple of interest rate hikes but right before the market really slowed down. We honestly got super lucky and eked out that sale in the nick of time.
But we’ll probably buy a home again in the next 2-3 years, when we decide where we want to settle. Which means we’ll need a down payment. Which means that the goal for our sale profit is not to spend it.
So we knew from the beginning—before we hit the road, before we sold, before we were sure we could do this at all—that we needed to afford this lifestyle on the same monthly income that we already had.
Now, if you know me at all, you know I love to talk about money. Learning about personal finance in my 20s completely changed my attitude toward money. Coming to understand the inequities in our world and systems helped me realize that a lot of “personal” problems are actually systemic ones that would be solved by paying people more. And talking to my friends and coworkers about money helped me (and them) advocate for higher pay for ourselves and each other. Not to get on a soapbox here, but it’s one of my big goals in life to get everyone financially educated and talking to each other about money.
With that in mind, I thought I’d use this week’s newsletter to talk about the financial planning that went into making this decision, and how we manage our money on the road.
A disclaimer: While I love talking about nitty-gritty specifics with other people, putting it out on the Internet feels a little different. So I won’t be using exact numbers in this newsletter. But I’m always open to talk more specifically if you reach out to me and have any questions; again, I love this stuff.
What do we have?
The first thing to do was take stock of our current income and expenses.
Aaron and I both make good money, let’s be honest about that. Probably in the lower to middle range of Seattleites in our industries, but very high for people who come from Mississippi. He works for Amazon with a salary. I am a freelancer, so my income can vary, but I have a high-enough hourly rate that I can save up for times with no work. Sometimes that looks like regularly working for 20 hours a week (like right now), which gives us enough to live on, meet expenses, and build a little bit of a safety buffer in our account. Or it can look like working 40 hours a week for a few weeks in a row, which allows us to save up a lot more and then coast when I don’t work for several weeks after that.
Taking stock of Aaron’s take-home pay was easy; it’s the same every month. For myself, I looked at the past six months of income and averaged it out. Put these two numbers together, and we have an idea of our total household income.
What do we spend?
Now, expenses. We were already using a budget, so I pulled it up and wrote out all the categories and the amounts (or averages) that we spent each month.1
From there, I made a separate list of “Things We Won’t Spend Money on While Traveling.” This included mortgage payment, internet, sewer capacity charge (a fun little home-owning fee for our particular townhouse), electricity, and Darcy.
And y’all. We were spending a lot on this dog. Some of it was absolutely necessary—paying for quality trainers and classes, good food, plenty of treats for training sessions around her triggers, and vet visits, which were pricey because of the amount of time, effort, and sedation that she required. But also...we got her so many toys, extra treats, and harnesses. Why so many harnesses?!? Some little part of my brain really thought that the right harness was just magically gonna make things easier for her. Sigh.
What will we spend?
Now I made a second list: “Things We’ll Spend More on While Traveling.” This one was more guesswork, and we could probably stand to revisit it now that we’ve been doing this for a few months. I wrote down eating out, gas for the car, car repairs, and miscellaneous activities (tickets for events, rock climbing gym passes, etc.). And I also added to this list other new expenses, like paying monthly for our storage unit in Seattle and, of course, our Airbnb costs.
The biggest reason for doing this was to figure out how much we should spend on our Airbnbs. It was going to be hard to find monthly Airbnbs for the cost we’d been spending on our mortgage. But because we had all these other costs that would now be on the Airbnb host’s plate instead of ours (electricity, Internet, etc.), we could take some of that money and add it to our travel housing category.
So I wrote out our entire new budget, including our new category estimates, and left the Airbnb cost blank. Tallied it all up, subtracted it from our estimated monthly income (which I’d rounded down to be safe), and then the leftover amount was what we could spend on the Airbnb.
We did make some cuts to our personal fun money. I know every married couple handles money differently, but for us, we have a joint checking account (and joint savings account) for the majority of our expenses, and then we each have our own personal checking accounts. When we get paid, our paychecks go into the joint checking account, and we each transfer out a pre-determined amount to our personal accounts.
(Quick aside: We actually do this because I heard a divorce lawyer advise it, years before we got married. Her recommendation was that everyone have a personal account, where they can spend and prioritize their personal money without having to justify it to their spouse who may have different priorities. I think it’s the absolute best.)
After looking at the budgets for travel, we cut our personal fun money by 25%. Neither one of us is impulsively ordering things online, and we’re not buying as many books or video games or clothes as we might when at home. We’re eating out more together instead of separately. So far, it’s working really well, and we haven’t missed that little bit of extra cash.
How’s it going?
We’re three and a half months into this, and we’ve learned a lot already.
I overestimated how much we’d spend on gas. We made our budget when gas prices were surging like crazy over the summer, and they’ve gone back down at least a little. And yes, we need large amounts of gas moving from place to place, but that’s only once a month. We still don’t drive all that much once we settle somewhere (though, maybe I’ll eat these words after LA).
I underestimated eating out. In Seattle, we were almost never eating out together because of the dog’s separation anxiety. We did order in, but not too often. And because we hadn’t really re-entered the world since locking down in 2020, we weren’t going out with friends much at all. So even increasing what we’d been spending on eating out didn’t match what our reality has been so far, now that we’re dog-free, in new places, and meeting up with friends and family more. I do want us to be better about cooking at home and for our friends, and rein this part of the budget back in a bit, but I’m also okay with spending a little more right now as we enjoy our freedom for the first time in two years.
The other category I underestimated was the most expensive: the Airbnbs. We know we’re visiting some expensive cities. And that Airbnb prices are going up and messing with the housing market. And that we probably need to book a little farther ahead if we want to stay within our budget.
But it is so frustrating to do an Airbnb search—to pick the dates, set all the filters for the type of place we want, and set a price maximum—only to find a place that works perfectly, go to reserve it, and see that price increase by $300-600 with all the extra fees that get added. (Actually, it looks like Airbnb is about to change this, which is great.) And when you’re not booking far enough in advance, your options can be so limited that you don’t have much choice but to accept this price increase. So we’re working on booking earlier, reducing that price maximum while we search, and trying to find places that work within our actual budget.
Keeping it up
Writing this post is a good reminder to revisit what we’re spending every few months. And every city will have different priorities. In Los Osos, we spent a lot on groceries because we cooked for family and ourselves more. Here in LA, we’re going to spend more on eating out, and on events like comedy shows. In Arizona, or Tennessee, or Georgia, something else will take top priority.
That’s what I like about having a flexible budget—nothing is set in stone, and you can flex categories up and down based on your priorities and needs of the moment.
So that’s it! That’s how we’re managing our money while traveling. It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, but we’re finding what works for us.
If this is a topic you’re interested in, or want me to dig into more in the future, let me know in the comments. I love it, but I have no idea if other people love it too.
What else is going on? This week:
I read this great piece by Anne Helen Petersen (she never disappoints) all about building community and learning to receive help as much as give it, with some straight-forward ways on how to do that.
We walked to Echo Park, which has a nice, flat route around a small pond and is great for walking/running without dealing with the steep hills that surround our Airbnb.
We saw an improv show with my sister and her boyfriend, plus a friend of ours from high school. We saw a lot of comedians we knew, and had a great time catching up over greasy diner food after the show.
I went to a screenwriter’s meetup and met a few writers I’ve only known online for the past three years. It was a good time.
We had a lovely dinner at my sister’s home. This is the best part about traveling, being close to friends or family we haven’t gotten to see regularly, without the pressure of, “we only have a weekend together!” We ate a meal, we played Ticket to Ride, we laughed a lot.
If you’re curious: I use You Need A Budget, which is my favorite budgeting system of all time. It’s flexible: you budget out the money that you have instead of having set amounts for categories every month. Made extra this month? Give yourself extra eating out money. Made less? Cut back on your fun money category. This is especially helpful for freelancers with variable income.
YNAB is a subscription service, and they offer a 34-day free trial for you to get a whole month of budgeting under your belt before pulling the trigger. Their website also provides a ton of free resources, so I always tell people to go on their site, read about the rules and the general mindset of the whole thing, and then create your own budget if you don’t want to pay to use their apps.
If you want to try it, you can use my referral link, but I won’t be offended if you don’t.